Books

The Glad River

Preface

And I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds . . . . —Jeremiah 23:3

There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God . . . . —Psalm 46:4

Claudy Momber was born near Claughton Station in Claughton County, Mississippi, on February 29, 1920. His mother did not want to name him Claudy because in Mississippi in 1920 Claudia was pronounced “Claudy,” and that was a girl’s name. His father gave him the name but did not call him by any name at all until he was almost a year old. When the first sounds he made were doo, instead of buh or duh, he called him Doops. The day he started to school, his father went with him and wrote his name on the blackboard. CLAUDY. He told the teacher and eleven frightened first-graders that what he had written was pronounced “Claudy,” and that was a boy’s name. He wrote “Claudia” underneath it and told them it was pronounced “Claud-ee-ah,” and that was a girl’s name. Then he erased both names and stood his son up on the teacher’s desk and told the startled teacher and first-graders that the boy’s real name was Doops. He walked out the door leaving his son standing on top of the teacher’s desk. No one called him anything else again. He was inducted into the army on May 1, 1942, as Doops Momber.

Kingston Smylie was named Kingston Smylie by his mother three days after he was born near Cummings, Mississippi. She knew that she would never see her baby’s father again and decided that her baby’s grandfather, who had brought her there from Frilot Cove, Louisiana, when she was four months pregnant, was not going to give him a name.

Fordache Arceneau was born about seven miles from Mermentau, Louisiana. Nobody knows for sure who named him. Perhaps his grandmother. She spoke only Cajun French and told the boy’s mother that no other good French names were left because they had had so many babies.

Cecelia Geronymus was born in 1513 in Amsterdam, where she lived all her life, except for the four years she was in a convent in East Fresia. She was drowned in a bag in the Amstel River in the spring of 1550, having been found by the state to be guilty of sedition on account of her religious beliefs and practices.

The exact date of Pieter Boens’s birth is not known. From all available records, it is thought that he was born about 1510 in Alsace. He was executed by fire in Amsterdam, one hour after Cecelia died.

Goris Cooman was the son of a Dutch soldier and a Spanish Moor. He was born in Antwerp in January 1498, and died with Pieter Boens.

They were related by blood.

Chapter 1

Doops was sitting on a dead cypress tree, uprooted years before by one of the hurricanes that periodically blow in from the gulf and wear themselves out as they seek to accomplish the same wrack in the thickets and timberlands as they inflict upon the towns and villages along the shoreline. It was his first week at Camp Polk, Louisiana. He was pretending that the Kisatchie National Forest where he was sitting was the jungles of some South Pacific island and that he was about to go into battle for the first time, when he heard a subdued sobbing in the distance. He knew from the beginning that it was the sound of a soldier far from home, a new soldier feeling exactly what he was feeling. At first he tried to ignore it. But as the soft whimpering became louder, grew into almost hysterical weeping, Doops began walking toward it. As he moved along he hummed and whistled a tune. As he drew closer he began singing the words out loud.

"Move it over. Move it over.

Move it on over there.

There’s another dirt load

Coming down the road,

So move it on over there."

He saw a soldier standing alone in a small clearing. The soldier did not stop crying and when Doops walked up beside him he did not seem to notice. Doops did not speak, just stood beside him, not even looking at him. When the man stopped crying, turned away and blew his nose between his thumb and forefinger, Doops put his hand on his shoulder. “I know the feeling, neighbor.” The soldier did not answer, but did not move away either. Doops ruffled a pile of cypress needles and sat down, watching the man at the same time. “I know the feeling, neighbor,” he said again.

“I’m sorry,” the soldier whispered, his voice cracking. “I’m real sorry.” He backed away a few steps and sat down too, facing Doops.

“Sorry for what?” Doops asked.

“I’m just sorry. Real sorry. I never cried before. I never cried before in my whole goddamn life.”

“What about when you were a little boy? You ever cry then?”

“I reckon. Not much though. My mamma said I never did cry much. Said I didn’t even cry when she borned me. Said the doctor kept hitting me on the rump to make me cry and kept on smacking me till the nurse grabbed me away from him and said, ‘For God’s sake, he’s breathing. Leave him alone.’ I’m okay though now. You can go on.” Doops did not move. “I guess you’ll tell everybody in this chickenshit army that you saw me crying,” the soldier said.

“Here,” Doops said, handing him his handkerchief. The soldier took it without embarrassment, wiped both his eyes, blew his nose again, and handed it back. Doops opened his barlow knife and began to whittle a toothpick from a small twig.

“They call me Doops,” he said, putting down the knife and extending his hand. The man stood up and bent over to shake his hand. Good breeding, Doops thought, standing up too. Good folks always stand up to shake hands.

A small army plane, part of the Louisiana maneuvers, moved out of the treetops above them, dropped a small sack filled with powdered chalk, banked sharply, and flew off. The sack landed in a bayou fifty yards away, breaking open when it hit and spreading a film of white dust over the dark water. The sound of the plane faded in the distance and died away.

“That’s a bomb,” Doops said. “If the war umpires find you with any of that flour on you they declare you dead. Or hurt, depending on how much gets on you, I guess.

“What they have to find on you to declare you missing?” the man asked. “’Cause that’s what I’m fixing to be. Slam gone.”

“I suppose if we have to have a war, that’s the best kind to have,” Doops said, not commenting on what the man had said. “Just drop chalk on one another and then count up the score. Count up the dead ones and the hurt ones and declare a winner.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” the man said. “But I wish they had of dropped it on me back home.” He moved a step closer to Doops and shook his hand again. “Had of. Some grammar, huh? And me been to college.”

“Talking is to make folks understand you,” Doops said. “You can do it any way you want to. At least, that’s the way I always figured it. Particular if you know better. That’s the way I always figured it.”

“My name’s Kingston Smylie,” the man said. “I’m a Redbone.”

“It’s a redneck,” Doops laughed. “And I’m one too.”

“No, it ain’t redneck. It’s Redbone. Redneck is white. Redbone ain’t nothing. Redneck is cracker. Redbone ain’t even nigger.”

“Redbone?” Doops asked.

“Yeah. Redbone. That means I don’t exist.”

Doops had never heard the word before and the disparaging manner in which the man spoke of himself, using a word Doops had never heard before, made him uncomfortable. “Is that something like a bluetick?” Doops laughed.

“Yeah. I reckon it is. Yep, it’s a lot like being a bluetick hound.”

“Well neighbor, I don’t know what a Redbone is. So why are you telling me you are one?”

“Because you saw me cry. And when a man sees another man cry that means he knows all there is about him. It ain’t that way with women. My mamma said men like to see women cry so they can call them weak, but they won’t cry themselves so they can think they are strong. I don’t know. But I know nobody else ever saw me cry before and nobody else knows I’m a Redbone. Just me and you know that.” They were sitting on the ground again and Doops was chewing on the toothpick he had whittled. “And now I’ve got to tell you the rest of it,” the man said.

“The rest of what?” Doops asked, spitting the toothpick out.

“The rest of my story. I’ve got to tell you the rest of it.” They began to walk aimlessly about the area. Doops wished that the soldier would not tell him whatever it was he was about to tell him, that they could just walk back to the camp together. But as the soldier began to move in the opposite direction from the camp, motioning for Doops to follow, Doops knew that what he was about to hear was very important to the man and would probably be important to him as well. They walked for several minutes before the man began. When he did speak, it was as though he were reading from a book, as if he had rehearsed the words. Doops hurried to keep up, listening. But for a long time he did not understand what he was hearing.

“My daddy told me all this stuff I’m going to tell you when I was sixteen years old. On the very day I was sixteen years old he took me in a brand-new pickup truck he had just bought and we rode to New Orleans. It took us three hours to get there and four hours to get back. When we got to New Orleans, he drove all the way down Canal Street to the ferryboat and then he drove the truck onto the boat. Halfway across to Algiers, right in the middle of the Mississippi River, he got out of the truck and told me to get out too. Standing there on the deck of the ferryboat in the middle of the Mississippi River he handed me the keys to that truck and said I was a man now and said that brand-new pickup truck be longed to me. He told me to get behind the wheel and I did. When we got to the other side of the river, he told me to turn around and get back on the ferry. That we were going back home. Man, you know, I had been driving tractors and old trucks around the farm since I could remember, but I sure as hell had never driven anything off and on a Mississippi River ferryboat, and never in all that New Orleans traffic.

“But that’s what he told me to do and that’s what I did, jerking and stopping and starting and honking the horn with one elbow out the window, just like a real dude. And just as soon as I started to drive that brand-new pickup truck, even before we got off that ferryboat, he started to talk to me. I don’t reckon he had said a thousand words to me before in my whole life. He just never did talk much.

“When I was trying to turn around on the Algiers side of the river, we got caught right smack dab in the middle of a parade. You ever been to New Orleans? God bless, they have parades about everything. Here was a nigger church parade with nigger cowboys on white horses and a nigger queen sitting up on a high truck they called a float, waving and smiling and throwing little things off the side and people fighting and scampering trying to catch them. You ever been to New Orleans? Everybody blowing brass horns and beating drums and twisting and turning this way and that. Well, there I was, caught in the middle of the Greater Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church parade in a brand-new pickup truck and my daddy fixing to tell me something that would scare the living shit out of me.”

Doops stopped walking and took the soldier by the arm. “Wait a minute, Smylie. You sure you want to tell me all this? Man, we don’t even know one another.”

“You got half of it right,” Kingston said. “I don’t know you. But you know me. I didn’t ask you out here in the middle of the woods where I was. My daddy told me to listen real good. And that’s what I’m telling you to do now.

“And then right off he told me he wasn’t my daddy, that he was my granddaddy. Well, I had noticed, you know, when I got big enough, that him and my mamma didn’t . . . well, you know . . . act like married people at night and all that. When I was little, my mamma slept in the room and in the bed with me. But then when I got bigger, she slept in another room. But I’ll tell you the truth, I never did think too much about it.

“Well, it scared the hell out of me and I didn’t know what to say, didn’t even know what to call him if I needed to call him something all at once. All my life I had been calling somebody Daddy and now all of a sudden I’m supposed to call him Granddaddy. Or something. I didn’t say a word and he kept on talking. He told it real slow and it wasn’t until we had crossed the river to Algiers and gone back through New Orleans and was getting off the Airline Highway heading up 51 outside of LaPlace, almost to Manchac Pass, that I began to make any sense out of what he was saying.”

Doops made a quick turn in the direction of the main camp but when Kingston realized it he turned and caught up with him, nudging him in the opposite direction.

“I thought we had always lived on this big ole farm outside of Cummings, Mississippi. That’s the only home I ever knew and I thought that was where we had always lived. But he said we had come there from Frilot Cove, Louisiana. And to tell you the truth, that ain’t too far from where we are right now. He said he had a big plantation at Frilot Cove that his daddy had left him. He said his wife, who would have been my grandmother—I got so mixed up I didn’t know one from another anyway—died when my real daddy was born and he raised him there by himself. He said he raised him right, made him work, and took him to the Baptist church. But somehow he broke bad when he was just a yearling boy, started running around at night with a bad crowd, drinking beer and wine, and fighting and getting in all kinds of trouble and wouldn’t go to school. But he said he never did whip him or anything, just tried to get along with him and raise him right. We were up past Hammond by then and he said he needed to go to the rest room and told me I better check to see if my truck needed some gas. I swear to you I was so mixed up I thought about jumping out of that truck and running like hell. But I just sat there. And when he got back in the truck he picked up right where he left off.”

Doops slowed almost to a stop. “Kingston. I really don’t think you ought to be telling me all this. I mean, I really don’t get it. Why don’t we just forget the whole thing. You really haven’t told me much yet and . . . well, hell. So what! So I saw you crying. Everybody cries sometimes. But that don’t mean you’re disgraced, that you’ve got to spill your guts to a rank stranger.” Kingston paid him no mind.

“And that’s when he told me about the Redbone folks. He said his boy, my daddy I reckon, started messing around with this Redbone girl. I didn’t know what a Redbone was. You know, like you said, I’ve been called a redneck by the town shits who lived in the big city of downtown Cummings, but I hadn’t ever heard of a Redbone. He said they were a bunch of people who stayed pretty much off to themselves and didn’t mix with other people. Sort of a clan like. He said the main people—he didn’t say white people, but I knew that was what he was getting at—wouldn’t let them go to their schools, and the Redbones wouldn’t go to school with the colored people. So they had their own schools and churches and lived off to themselves. He said folks just called them Redbones, he reckoned because they was supposed to have Indian blood in them. He said a lot of them might be real dark and look like colored people and some of them had blond hair and blue eyes, but he said most all of them had big stubby noses and used to go around pinching their noses to make them look like the main people’s noses. He told me folks thought they was a mixture of Indian and white and colored. They wasn’t white and they wasn’t colored. They was just . . . Redbones. And that’s what everybody called them. Redbones. Everybody except them. He said if you wanted to start a fight you could call one of them a Redbone to his face. And if you really wanted to start a fight you could call one of them a nigger.”

This time it was Kingston who slowed down. “You still want me to quit talking? If you don’t want to hear the rest of it, you don’t have to. I’ll stop right now and you won’t ever be bothered with me again. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

Without saying anything at all Doops quickened his pace and Kingston resumed talking.

“Well, anyway, you know, his boy was running around with this Redbone girl, and everybody was talking. You couldn’t do that. Then one day this Redbone girl’s daddy came over and called the old man outside and told him that his boy had done his daughter wrong, that she was in a family way. He said he took the girl’s daddy inside his house, something you wasn’t supposed to do either, and called his boy in and asked him in front of the man if he had done that Redbone girl wrong. His boy denied it at first, just said why would he want to mess around with a Redbone girl when there was plenty of good-looking white girls around. But he knew he was lying and right there in front of that man he beat the tar out of his boy with a plow line until he told him the truth. Then he beat him some more because he had lied to him and then he beat him some more because he had messed around with a Redbone girl. Finally, he said, it was her daddy who caught him around the waist and held him and wouldn’t let him beat him anymore. Said that wasn’t doing anybody any good.”

Suddenly Kingston stopped walking and grabbed Doops by the collar, jerking him toward him.

“Hold it,” Doops said. “What’s your problem? Now I didn’t ask you to tell me all that. Tried to get you not to tell me. You just started talking. So why you riled all of a sudden?”

“Never mind who asked and who didn’t ask. I want to know what you’re thinking. Right now!”

“What I’m thinking? You really want to know what I’m thinking?” Doops asked.

“Yeah. I really do. And tell me the honest to God truth. What are you thinking right this very second.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you the honest God truth what I was thinking just the very second you grabbed me.”

“Tell me,” Kingston said.

Doops began to laugh and jostle the man playfully. “I was thinking,” Doops said, “I was just thinking about asking you to let me check your moons.” Doops stopped laughing when he saw that Kingston didn’t think it funny.

“Yeah. I know about that too. I guess you’re kidding me. I reckon I hope you are. But my daddy, that’s my granddaddy, told me that’s what the main people at Frilot Cove used to do, used to say. They always said if somebody had one drop of nigger blood in their veins, no matter how little and how far back it went, their fingernails would have half-moons on them. Well, here you are. Take a good look, Private Doops.” He opened both hands with the palms down and thrust them at Doops.

“I’ve got moons! Now what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking you got moons,” Doops said, not laughing. “So go on.”

“Well, anyway, the next morning the boy, my daddy, my real daddy I reckon you might say, was gone. He had stolen a thousand dollars the old man had hid in the house because he didn’t trust banks and he was clean gone. He said he didn’t even look for him, knew his boy wasn’t ever coming back again. So that very same day he went down and advertised his place for sale. Then he went to the girl’s daddy, my mamma’s daddy, my other granddaddy I reckon you might say, and told her what he was going to do. He told him he wanted to adopt the girl, legally you know, and finish raising her and raise the baby. Me. Well, he said they was real poor. I mean he said they lived in a house worse than his chickenhouse. So my mamma’s daddy and his wife both went with my granddaddy to Baton Rouge and they all signed some papers and then my mamma was his daughter. Then, soon as he sold the place, he went to Mississippi and bought that big farm where I was raised. He moved up there and joined the Catholic Church, I guess because the Redbones was all Catholic, and they’ve been living there ever since. And still live there. Even though my mamma was just fifteen years old at the time, she was a big girl and looked a lot older. He said he didn’t tell folks anything, you know, that she was his wife or she wasn’t his wife. But everybody just thought she was and since she had his name then, they would naturally think that, and he never told anybody any different.”

Kingston stopped talking as abruptly as he had begun. Neither of them spoke again for a long time. They continued to walk, wandering, going nowhere. Finally Doops broke the silence.

“That why you were crying out there in the woods?”

“No. I never even cried the whole time he was telling me all that. Maybe I was so proud of that brand-new pickup truck, but I never did cry. I almost cried when it finally dawned on me what he was saying. But then I started laughing like hell. My granddaddy asked me what was so funny. I said, ‘It sounds like you’re telling me I belong in the Greater Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church parade.’ He didn’t think that was funny worth a cuss. But then he never did laugh at anything. I’ve never seen my granddaddy laugh. Never in my whole life. But he’s a hell of a man. One hell of a man. I was crying out there in the woods because I’m so goddamn homesick for him I could die.”

“Homesick?” Doops asked.

“Yeah. Home sick,” he answered, dividing the word into two words.

“Well, like I told you,” Doops said, “I know the feeling.”

“And the hell of it is, I don’t even have to be here. I mean, legally I’m not really in the army. My daddy—I just kept calling him Daddy even after he told me all that—told me when the war started that if I didn’t want to be drafted I could go back to Frilot Cove and live with some of my blood kinfolks down there and I never would be drafted. He said the colored people and the white people didn’t get put together in the army and the draft board down there just left the Redbones alone. I mean, there’s an army for white people and an army for colored people. But there ain’t no army for Redbone people. So he said they just left them alone, pretended they weren’t there.”

“Did you really want to get drafted?” Doops asked. “Hell, I had to come. I didn’t want to come.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly want to get drafted but it’s kind of funny putting one over on this chickenshit army. I mean, those guys over there in that quartermaster outfit, across the bayou, from the lightest mulatto to the niggerest nigger, they’re over there because they knew what to tell the draft boards to put on their records. And then when the army got them, they knew where to put them, what to do with them. Just look at the forms the draft board filled out and you’ve got a soldier or a niggersoldier. But they go by check marks on a form. They don’t go by moons on your fingernails. So I screwed ’em. Maybe I ought to be across the bayou.”

“Yeah, I guess that is kinda funny,” Doops said. “Yeah, that’s just as funny as hell.” But neither of them was laughing.

Doops put his hand on the man’s shoulder and turned him around, looking directly into his eyes. “Do you trust me, Kingston?”

“Yes. I trust you, Doops. Do you trust me?”

“Yes. I trust you.” They stood shaking hands again, looking each other squarely in the eyes.

“Then are we buddies?” Kingston asked. Neither face showed any expression.

“Yes. We are buddies. I’m your buddy.”

“Are you my friend?”

“Friend?” Doops replied. “Friend.” He repeated the word but no longer as a question, his voice dropping. “That’s a stronger word. We’ll have to see. But we’re neighbors. Like I say, we’re neighbors. I know that much.”

“I ought to cut you with my knife,” Kingston said, laughing out loud and slapping Doops on the back.